Moon

The moon may be the most heavily used image in the naming of daughters anywhere in the world, and the reason is not hard to guess. It is the one celestial body that visibly changes, returns, and keeps time. Almost every agricultural calendar was built on it.

What makes the moon unusual among the ideas in this Atlas is that a single Indo-European root is still visible across an enormous stretch of territory. Persian māh, Sanskrit mās, Latin mēnsis, Greek mēn and the English pair moon and month all descend from one reconstructed ancestor meaning something close to the measurer. The moon was the original clock, and the word for it and the word for a month are the same word wearing different clothes. A Pakistani girl called Mahnoor — light of the moon — and the English word month are carrying the same inherited syllable.

Turkic does something entirely separate and equally productive. The element ay simply means moon, and it compounds freely: Aygul is moon-flower, Aynur moon-light, Aysel moon-stream. Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek all build names this way, and the pattern is so regular that you can often guess a meaning without knowing the language. This is inheritance within Turkic, not a borrowing from Persian, even though the two traditions sit side by side geographically and often in the same household.

Sanskrit contributes candra, from a root meaning to shine, and Tamil — which belongs to a different family altogether — has nila. Arabic qamar and Hebrew yārēaḥ come from a third family again. Four unrelated linguistic stocks, one object in the sky, and no shortage of daughters named after it.